Wednesday, November 28, 2007

3 things that could be inside your Mac or PC in 5-10 years

1. 81Ghz Diamond CPUs That's right, diamonds... the hardest material known to man. Not only does it make perfect sense, but these diamond semiconductors have actually already been experimentally developed and clocked at speeds at ~81Ghz. The only problem is that DeBeers controls the price of these gems and they are obviously extremely expensive to use in a desktop computer.However, there's company, Gemesis, that has already released a process that has been able to "culture" diamonds in a lab at a fraction of the price for the modern day natural gems. The estimated cost is somewhere around $5 a carat. So obviously, its only a matter of time before these diamonds are used for numerous manufacturing applications.

2. Magnetic memory (MRAM)As you may know, the problem with the RAM in your computer today, is that it's "volatile" and can not directly store data when it is powered off. However, various companies, such as Micromem or Freescale have been spearheading the recent development of "Magnetic RAM", a memory technology that promises to provide non-volatile, low-power, high speed and low-cost memory by being able to simply store memory directly on these semiconductors, the same way a hard disk does today. Although this technology has been around since the 90s, due to some recent breakthroughs, the time may be coming soon were this could eventually replace, Flash, DRAM, and even Hard Disks. For all you investors, all the companies behind this technology are here: http://www.mram-info.com/companies

3. Mesh networkingWireless Mesh networking is basically the networking concept that each node or router would act as a repeater, which would be expanding its infrastructure as more nodes are added to the mesh. It may sound a little socialistic, but imagine that instead of you going to Comcast or AT&T for an internet connection, you simple hopped on your neighbors connection and so and so on. Of course, the great thing about this technology, is that it is inherently FREE, as it should be...like going to the library.